A leaked internal report shows that NASA's ambitions to get its new moonshot spacecraft off the ground in five years may be thwarted by technical and financial issues.
The agency's publicly-announced deadline to conduct a first test launch of a manned Orion capsule is 2015, although internally it hoped to fast-track this to …

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A pale shadow of past glories

The Apollo programme solved far greater challenges in the 1960s, including heat shield design, shaking during launch and hatch doors that were hard to open (remember Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee and Ed White?).

It's a far cry from NASA's heroic answer to Kennedy's "before this decade is out" challenge.

How can it be so difficult...

How can it be so difficult to return to the moon? I mean it was accomplished in the late 60s, and not technology has progressed it should be easier/safer. Has NASA just forgotten the expertise it gained in that period?

I understand that they are developing en entirely new spacecraft and launch system, but surely it will be based on the Saturn V and just improved.

They only want to beat China...

NASA= Low Tech.

Have you been to Kennedy? it's really low tech. Everywhere else in florida has automated everything (you only ever need to touch one thing when you go to the bathroom). Kennedy is rusty, old, manual and looks like it hasnt changed at all since the seventies. If they cant even get a bathroom right, they will never get back to the moon. I vote the Japanese have a go, as they will at least do it efficiently!

Re-inventing the Wheel

Are the designers starting from scratch? Even though the Saturn V is 40 years old I'm sure they could learn something from it. Surely modern materials and electronics should enhance a proven design or are they too proud to look at some elses work?

NASA in the 60's

Chestnut?

'NASA's plans would shortchange astronauts' daily water needs, giving them only two liters a day when medical experts say they need at least 2.5 liters".'

I thought that was bollox now. Some American did a study in the 50's and concluded the human body needs 2.5 litres of liquid a day. This includes ALL liquid intake, but is usually (wrongly) taken to be water requirement.

The (real) arab guys I have met exist on a much lower water intake than 2.5lt.

Then there's the new-improved, American way of doing things. Design engine, build prototype, test, BANG. Hold series of meetings on subject of BANG, recommend changes to prevent BANG, send recommendations back to design, hold workshop on new design, suggest changes to suggested changes, conduct risk analysis on proposed changes, rework budget based on impact of proposed changes, redesign, have new design signed off for prototyping, produce prototype, test, BANG. Oh and if anyone breaks a fingernail as a result of BANG, suspend project for five years of public hand-wringing.

When they saw the number of iterations the Russians had been through to get the beggars working, they worked out it would have taken them several decades to do what had actually been achieved in as many years.

@new design wheels anyone?

Yeah because your ford mondeo still has wooden wheels with a diameter of 4 feet and steel bands instead of tyres.

You can't be seriously suggesting that they take 40 year old technology and just gaffer tape it to the vehicle ? You wouldn't expect to do that in any other area of manufacturing, so why should NASA do it ?

I don't care if it worked "back then", they are not applying it to a vehicle constructed from techniques used "back then". They are taking the basic principles of the vehicle as it was designed and upgrading them - not re-implementing exactly the same design.

For example:

"Orion will be similar in shape to the Apollo spacecraft, but significantly larger. The Apollo-style heat shield is the best understood shape for re-entering Earth’s atmosphere, especially when returning directly from the moon. Orion will be 5 meters (16.5 feet) in diameter and have a mass of about 22.7 metric tons (25 tons). Inside, it will have more than two-and-a-half times the volume of an Apollo capsule."

Do you suggest they just take on an old style hatch and graft it to the side of a different sized, and constructed vehicle ? Reminds me of a few Peugeot 205s I see round here, with massive whale tails and huge exhausts. Sure, that whale tail worked a treat on a Porsche but just bolting onto a Peugeot is senseless and stupid. Even NEW Porsches don't have tails like that any more.

Also bear in mind that Orion is only the crew capsule area on top of the Ares 1 launcher, much as Apollo was only the crew capsule area on top of the Saturn 5 launcher. Apollo had to deal with launch vibrations generated by a liquid fuel rocket, Orion has to deal with vibrations generated by a solid fuel booster. It's not inconceivable that the methods used to mitigate that vibration are going to be different.

Re: How can it be so difficult...

The "new, improved" Ares would appear to owe very little to Apollo or the Saturn V. Its a liquid fuel booster with two bloody great strap-on solid boosters, so I'd suggest it owes more to the Ariane series than to Apollo. However, NASA seems to have a strong 'not invented here' syndrome, so its possible that Ares is simply parallel design evolution and all the lessons ESA has learned are being ignored.

And yes, NASA has forgotten just about everything they learned from thje Apollo program and lost much of the data and documentation too. Why do you think they're enticing the surviving Apollo engineers out of retirement to tell the new boys how it used to be done?

@NASA in the 60's

"NASA spending made up more than five percent of the federal budget during the heady days of the Apollo program. If it received five percent of the federal budget today, its annual funding level would be $139.2 billion dollars"

Stolen from The Space Review website :)

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/898/1

The push from China will see the NASA budget slowly climb over the next few years, there has been a number of "leaks" around China's space program and the lack of funding for NASA..... so you can guarantee it!

Meanwhile UK gov spend £4 billion on a nice ship but dont have the money to improve services..repair the roads etc, hmmm :s

Wheelchair access.

It's all well and good complaining that they could copy door designs -- but the old designs didn't have to provide for wheelchair access and baby changing facilities.

Joking aside -- I suspect that the reason it is so much more difficult to plan a moon landing now is that the old technology doesn't meet modern safety standards. Take Concorde as an obvious example or how safety regulations move on.

Meanwhile, by the Tannhauser Gate

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Men walking up the beach of Mare Tranquillitatis. Airliners flying faster than the sun across the ocean, light glinting on their wings. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.… Time to die.

Ares and Saturn V

@ various people asking about the relationship to the Saturn designs: Ares (the launcher) is variations on a first stage consisting of a shuttle SRB with an extra segment attached, and a second stage that reuses the Saturn J2 second stage engine. Other components will come from variants of the unmanned Delta launcher, which has proven to be pretty reliable over a couple of decades. Engines apart, the rest of the vehicle is done from scratch partly because (apart from huge advances in computer-aided design, simulation and fabrication, and materials science in the last 40 years) the blueprints and design docs for those old systems are mostly long long gone in the bowels of the various private sector contractors who actually built the thing. Some of those companies are still around but the majority have been absorbed by others or gone out of business. It's not just a case of blowing the dust off the old production line and starting it up again.

Incidentally I believe the biggest problem with Ares so far is vertical oscillations (pogoing) caused by the fundamental way a solid rocket motor runs, burning along the whole length of the tube. STS (the shuttle) doesn't suffer from this as there are two boosters tied together by the ET.

Are they going to build a real lander this time?

Why it's so hard

NASA in the 1960s was receiving twice as much money (adjusted for inflation) as they are now and only had to worry about funding one major project at a time - not the mishmash of projects that they've been tasked with by various Congresses.

If the ISS was abandoned as the useless white elephant it is and the Shuttle immediately retired as being pointless without the ISS, NASA might have the money to begin working on the Orion project.

@ Anonymous Coward

'Incidentally I believe the biggest problem with Ares so far is vertical oscillations (pogoing) caused by the fundamental way a solid rocket motor runs, burning along the whole length of the tube. STS (the shuttle) doesn't suffer from this as there are two boosters tied together by the ET.'

Pogoing was a major problem with the Saturn V which was never entirely resolved. The unmanned Apollo 6 suffered such sever pogo that several pieces came off the rocket and it came close to structural failure. Apollos 11, 12 and 13 all experienced severe vibration during launch. On 13, the rocket very nearly never got into orbit; pogo caused one of the engines to shut down just before it tore loose of its mounting - which would have destroyed the rocket. Later flights used a slightly redesigned Saturn V and were much less rough on their crew.

Unfortunately pogo is one of those things that can't really be simulated on the ground with static tests, you can attempt to eliminate it at the design phase but the only real test is to light the candle - which is expensive and risky.

It's also worth pointing out that the Soviet N1 Moon rocket was destroyed by pogo in its last flight. The rocket was within seconds of completing the first successful burn of its first stage when pogo caused the computer to begin shutting down engines; the rocket tumbled out of control and exploded. With four out of four failures, the N1 was cancelled.

Two points...

Back in '69, the health+safety crowd were still in nappies, and people were willing to take a lot of risks. That sort of behaviour is not permitted these days - there has to be a near-guarantee of getting the astronauts out there and safely back. It wouldn't surprise me if there had been a few unpublished moon-attempts from NASA and CCCP ending very badly that we won't hear anything about for a number of years, if ever.

The other point is about the lack of water for the mission. If they can't fit it in their truck, why not send it on ahead in an unmanned box near the planned site, and then pick it up when they land (and defrost it)?

RE: stoopid question

The ISS is a dead project, soon to land in the ocean with its billions of wasted dollars. There's no point building a launch program that will so soon be obsolete. Incidently, that's why they should have scrapped both the ISS and the Shuttle long ago as someone else has mentioned.

Balls

NASA, and to a large extend the general populace, has lost its stones. During the ramp up to Apollo, we saw men who were willing to take the risk and hang it all on the line. Where are those men now?

Instead we have government bureaucracies who are intent on playing CYA with every decision they make. At this point in time, space travel is not a safe commodity. In our human history there were times when air & sea travel were equally unsafe. How many explorers set off to the New World and were lost to the pages of history? The rewards only come to those willing to take the risks.

Until we get some leadership with a couple brass ones, we will continue on as before. Bumbling along and trying to keep everyone safe. The real men are out there, they just choose not to get involved with the BS which takes the initiative out of everything.

On a final note... October 1957 was Sputnik. July 1969 was Apollo 11. Less than twelve years. What have we done of significance since 1996??

All rockets look the same to me

With the aerospace companies now run exclusively by MBAs instead of engineers (as many still were in the 1960s), cost overruns are inevitable as they can be extremely profitable. (One bids unrealistically low to get the contract, counting on NASA to make some requirements changes which allow you to jack the price up.)

That said, study the Apollo program a bit and you'll see that it was nothing but a series of technical challenges which had to be resolved. In particular, read the history of Grumman and the lunar module to see just how close it all came to not getting done.

The difficulty is what attracts a lot of engineers to the field.

And Aries V (the heavy lift launcher) has a much bigger payload capacity than the Saturn V ever did. Of course, it's also not man-rated so it's allowed to go BANG a bit more often.

Time to wonder given how this is progressing...

Will any of the 12 who have walked on the moon be alive to see the 13th on the moon? The mind wonders.

It seems that those with ANY experience have "left the building", and the replacement crew is attempting to make a go of it. Given all the people looking over their collective shoulders, it doesn't seem to be turning out well. In other industries, the sequel doesn't do as well as the original!

NASA-now powered by Lawyers

I bet the legal fees, the political correctness, and racial quotas enforced on every design team/contractor/subcontractor requirement had plenty to do with overruns. Plus the usual siphoning for pork, which lawyer/lawmakers are ever-so-good at.

Can you imagine the liability concerns of a moon project? A failure could cause "emotional duress" on thousands of people and they'd all sue. Not to mention the astronauts' families. Plus all those astronauts passed up for the first flights, "discriminated" against for not being in the prestegious first flight, "held back by The Man" because "they couldn't help the way they were born"-just a little slower, a little less intelligent, a little less an engineer, etc. than the guy who was chosen...

Plus, you've got to "represent" all races and religions so no one is "offended". Even if one race/gender/religion/orientation is less than .01% of the population, they have to get equal airtime. Any group not represented in prestige flights will surely sue as well.

What? hardware? Rockets? Are you insane? We can't allow such a risk of litigation!